Free eShop Games

Nintendo is giving away free games to members of the Ambassador Program that connected with the eShop before August 12, 2011. See below for detailed instructions on how to download the Ambassador Program Gameboy Advance and NES titles from the eShop.

The process to download the 3DS Ambassador titles -- a reward to early adopters who paid the full $250 for the system before its drastic price cut --involves jumping through a lot of user-unfriendly hoops. Rather than make all the games available in a normal eShop category or offering an option to opt in to an auto-download as with the Nintendo Video app, 3DS Ambassadors instead must laboriously track down and "redownload" each title individually. One by one, going through these steps.

Oh well. They're still free, right? It's hard to complain too much about that. So here's our step-by-step guide explaining how to get these games for yourself. Follow them, repeat them 10 times over and enjoy your new retro library on the go.

You might have already completed this first step before today, and if so you're good to skip ahead to Step #2 right away. You might also be a bit impatient and want to get to the downloading immediately, too, in which case you can also jump to the next step. But for the sake of offering a more complete guide, and to help anyone who might encounter issues with their Ambassador status, here's how to check and make sure you're eligible to grab these downloads in the first place.

First up, flip your 3DS over on its backside. Find the barcode-looking white sticker there and make a note of the combination of letters and numbers that appear on it. That's your system's serial number.

Next, visit Nintendo's 3DS Ambassador Eligibility page on support.nintendo.com. You'll find a box there to type your serial number into, then a big red button to click. If you're an Ambassador -- which means you purchased your 3DS and connected it at least once to the eShop before August 12 of this year -- then you'll get a happy message proclaiming "You are a Nintendo 3DS Ambassador!"

OK, now's where the process really starts. Power on your 3DS and make sure it's got enough battery charge to take you through 15 minutes or so of activity. Then confirm that your Wireless signal is turned on and transmitting -- if it is, your system's Home Menu will say "Enabled" or "Internet" in the top left corner of the upper screen and the light on the right side of the unit will be blinking. You'll also need to be somewhere where you're able to get a Wi-Fi signal.

Really, you should have done this all at least once before, because if you didn't previously connect to the eShop at least once before August 12, the Ambassador program wouldn't have registered you for membership.

After making sure you're ready to go from a technical perspective, locate the eShop icon on your Home Menu and click it. The eShop will launch – though slowly, perhaps. The amount of 3DS owners trying to simultaneously log on and grab these free games is certain to put a strain on Nintendo's servers, so don't be surprised if you encounter some delays in getting the Shop to fully open.

And here's where the unintuitive part begins. Instead of browsing through the normal eShop categories to find the Ambassador games, you actually need to scroll the eShop menu all the way over to the far left side. There, you'll find a button labeled "Settings/Other." Tap it with your stylus.

The next menu that appears has all kinds of account history on your previous eShop activity. Scroll down to the third listed option, "Your Downloads." Choose it.

What now shows up on your screen is a full list of all the games you've previously downloaded from the eShop. If you grabbed the free Pokedex 3D, it's there. If you've bought a 3DS Virtual Console game or DSiWare title, it's listed. You'll have to sort through all of your past purchases, however few or however numerous, to track down the new Ambassador games listed unorganizedly in the middle of all your other games.

At this point it's possible you won't yet see the games listed. That's a temporary thing – some American 3DS owners are reporting success (like myself), while others say they can't see them yet. (So it seems like today's early release might only be for some, with an element of luck involved.) The titles should appear in everyone's list by tomorrow at the latest, though. Sorry if you get to this point and you can't go any further quite yet.

When you find them, pick the one you want to download first. The order doesn't matter all that much, unless you're experiencing a lot of server lag – then you should prioritize getting your favorite title over the ones you care less about. (You can always come back for the rest on a later day, when less traffic is jamming up the process.)

After making your selection, you'll see two options listed for it – Software Info and Redownload. Now, "redownload" doesn't make much sense. You haven't downloaded these games before. But this is how Nintendo has decided to present these titles – they've edited each Ambassador's purchase history to make it seem like we all downloaded these games sometime in the past, then decided to delete them, and are now all choosing to come get them again.

It's weird, but it's a work-around for them that allows them to keep non-Ambassadors from ever seeing these titles show up in their version of the eShop. So just go ahead and click on Redownload to grab your game.

If the server's all smooth sailing for you, you should be treated to a brief animation and then have your first Ambassador game downloaded to your system's Home Menu by the end of Step #4. You can quit now and go play it if you like – or you can stick around and repeat the process over and over again to get all the rest of the games.

But, annoyingly, each successful download resets the eShop to its starting position. So, for each individual game, you'll need to once again scroll over to Settings/Other, then hit Your Downloads again, then surf through the list of old purchases again to find the next game you want to "redownload." It's a time-consuming process. But, again, it's hard to complain about games for free.

Note: New for the wave of GBA games in December 2011 is the fact that you can now choose "Download Later" instead of "Download Now," to queue up all of the Ambassador games to download as a group while your system sits in sleep mode. If you choose to go that route, this whole process gets a bit quicker -- since the eShop won't bounce you back to its starting page after every download.

At the end of it all you'll have a 3DS Home Menu full to bursting with happy little gift box icons. You'll then be able to "Unwrap" each game one by one and choose which one you want to play first – unless you want to stick around in the Shop for one last little freebie.

In addition to the 20 free games, there's an 21st download also newly available. Called the Ambassador Certificate, it's a standalone download that contains a three-minute, multilingual message and a cool piece of background music.

The message simply says that you can update your system's Notification settings to receive future messages from Nintendo about the Ambassador program. These will be broadcast later in the year, and will involve information about when the 10 Game Boy Advance Ambassador games will become available for download.

Downloading the Certificate and opting in to its notifications will take up only a small amount of your 3DS memory and will give you another SpotPass thing to look forward to. So why not?

Note One More Time: The Certificate is now pretty much worthless. But you can still grab it if you like.

That's the guide, ladies and gentlemen. Hopefully you're able to follow along the convoluted process without too much trouble and get to enjoy your free NES and GBA titles right away.

If you've run into any trouble along the way, post your questions as a Comment below and we'll do our best to address them. If you're having an issue getting confirmation about your Ambassador status – say, because Nintendo's website says you aren't one but you think you're supposed to be – then contacting Nintendo might be your best bet. Jump over to support.nintendo.com and go from there.